The city of Chisinau in historical plans until World War II.Preliminary considerations

Since the founding of the city in the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 20th century, Chisinau benefited from several cartographic representations, important for understanding the formation and development of its urban structure. Among the particularly valuable city plans drawn up in the 19th century, we mention those from 1817 and 1834, which on the one hand document the pre-imperial part of the town, and on the other hand present the plan for its territorial expansion. The city plan developed in 1942 by the Aero-Photogrammetric Institute from Bucharest occupies an important place in the cartography of Chisinau. The scale of the plan is 1:2000. It is a particularly valuable graphic document for understanding the urban development of the city of Chisinau from the middle of the 20th century. The plan proposes a careful documentation of the features of the relief, of anthropic interventions in the landscape – ponds/lakes, ditches, paths, roads, railways, bridges, streets, fences, constructions, also containing the first known representation of the historical urban plots.